Mary Beth Norton

Mary Beth Norton (born 1943) is an American historian. She is the Mary Donlon Alger Professor of American History at the Department of History at Cornell University.^[1][2]

Biography

Norton was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan.^[1] She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Michigan and her Master of Arts (1965) and Ph.D. (1969) from Harvard University,^[1] under Bernard Bailyn. Her doctoral dissertation, The British-Americans, was published by Little, Brown and Company and won the 1970 Allan Nevins Prize.^[3]

Her book Founding Mothers and Fathers (1996) was a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize.^[1] She was co-editor, To Toil the Livelong Day (1987), Women of America (1979), Major Problems in American Women's History (4th ed., 2007),^[1] and In the Devil's Snare (2002) about the Salem witch trials. She is also noted as one of the authors of the two-volume A People & A Nation, a popular American history textbook, currently in its ninth edition.^[4]

Norton has served on the National Council on the Humanities, as president of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, and as vice president for research of the American Historical Association.^[1] She also served as the general editor of the AHA Guide to Historical Literature in 1995.^[1] Norton was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999.^[5] She was also elected Speaker of the third Cornell University Senate. Norton has won grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation,^[6] and the Rockefeller Foundation.^[1]

Norton appears in a variety of history programs and documentaries about colonial times, including Salem Witch Trials in the Discovery Channel's Unsolved History series in 2003^[7] and in Witch Hunt on the The History Channel in 2004. She was interviewed in 2008 for the PBS Series History Detectives, on Season 6, Episode 7, "Front Street Blockhouse.".^[8] She appears in Salem Witch Hunt: Examine the Evidence in 2011^[9] for the Essex National Heritage Commission and the National Park Service^[10][11]

Works

• In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. Random House Digital, Inc. 2003. ISBN 9780375706905. 
• Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800. Cornell University Press. 1996. ISBN 9780801483479. 
• Founding Mothers & Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society. Random House Digital, Inc. 1997. ISBN 9780679749776. 
• Separated By Their Sex: Women in Public and Private in the Colonial Atlantic World. Cornell University Press. 2011. ISBN 9780801449499. 

References